ABSTRACT

Nothing is more modern than modernity, yet nothing is so old. This is because a tension lies at the very heart of the notion of modernity. ‘Do we live in an enlightened age?’ asked Kant in his 1783 An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment? ‘No,’ he answers himself, ‘but rather in an age of Enlightenment’ (Kant, 1983a: 45). In his stunning We Have Never Been Modern, Bruno Latour makes the troubling claim that the repertoire of modern critical analysis has always been internally inconsistent if not outright contradictory, and, more importantly, that we have always been at home in the non-modern world, living comfortably with hybrid combinations of natural and social objects-subjects (Latour, 1993). For Kant, as for Latour, modernity is a certain way of thinking, a perspective on the world that is also a perspective toward one’s self. Modernity, according to Latour, is an aspiration toward a concept, which, paradoxically, excludes itself from realization. It is the insight into a homogeneous set of principles that exclude realization. Common for all great diagnosticians of modernity is the insight that

modernity is not simply a turning point along one great linear path of selfunfolding historical facts. It is a way of thinking, of conceptualizing. To the degree that it is the quest for a kind of unity – of religion, culture and state – it is a methodology, a philosophical anthropology of human life, in which the human subject is autonomous and the world fragmentary (Delanty, 2000: 11). Modernity is, on the one hand, a temporal notion, a dimension of histor-

ical or temporal present-ness, or past-ness of differentiation from the past, of change and transformation, of newness, of a relation to present events, living people, recent memories, actions over which we have control, events that effect directly our lives (OED, 1971). Modernity thus refers to a process of transformation of change, a spaceless notion of transformation. What is modern is new. In this mode, modernity also contains a subtle normative dimension, a temporal hubris, a set of implicit value claims about the past versus the present, the civilizational position of society in a long-term sliding mode. On the other hand, modernity is a historicized category referring to a

broad constellation of social, cultural, religious and political formations. Modernity in this sense is a certain form of social life, marking the end of a certain historical evolution, growing out of particular concrete historical changes: the secular state and polity, capitalist economy, social formations of the division of labour and relations to secular culture (Hall et al., 1992). Among other things, historical modernity refers to the emergence of a certain kind of institutionalization of the nation-state from a historical situation in which traditional institutions and structures dominated. In traditional societies, the structure of family, village and church determined the shape and self-understanding of the individual subject, providing role, a meaning and a set of collective references – what we commonly call political identity. This notion of self-understanding is central to the notion of modernity, both

in terms of its historical emergence and its continued evolution. Modernity refers to a kind of relationship to one’s self, an understanding of one’s present. It is a self-understanding, an understanding of the world projected through an understanding of one’s self in the world and in time. In the following we will re-cast political modernity as a world order in which the structures and constellations of power undergo an important transformation, one that will have long-ranging consequences for the singular form of European construction known as the European Union. Political culture is a constellation of meanings, values, symbols, ideas,

knowledge, language and ideology that constitute political activity recognized as such. Political culture is the available set of concepts and ideas, categories of understanding and means of expression that render political reality understandable, and which ascribe to it the moral, economic and social values it might seem to have. Thus where the conventional measures of modernity – processes of economic, social and political development – possess clear, even material, measures, these measures are determined by the political culture of a society. In other words, political culture does not precisely reflect modernity. It is,

rather, constitutive of it. In some sense the very notion of political culture is at odds with the movement of political modernity. It is thus incorrect to simply state that modernity has had an impact on political culture, as our session title suggests. Political culture produces modernity in the sense that it produces concept, meanings and values that are then co-opted by the social sciences and deployed in order to legitimate political activity, for the modernization of politics corresponds more or less to a double evolution of (1) narrowing the reach of the concept to techniques of political action and control, and thereby (2) to an instrumentalization of politics. The modernity of European corresponds with the modernity of a certain

idea of the ‘social’. Traditionally, modern societies are identified with the changes brought about by the emergence of industrialization in the 19th century. Moreover, the very notion of modernity is inseparable from certain transformations in the nature and methods of scientific investigation. Social science, in particular, and modernity are reciprocally determinate.